Can we kick some real terrorist ass please?

[Edan]

Originally posted by GePap


There was Latin American terrorism (as there still is today) and Americans were targeted, but only when in the region. Most Latin America terro groups lacked the resources or the ideological reasons to attack the US directly. Many were marxists and sught political change at homer. Attacking the US did little with regard to their aims. More importantly, most Latin America regimes are less capable than Arab ones at internal repression. Those regimes have oil money and bribe money to sue for that. Take Hizbullah: the largest and best armed Terror org in the world. It has never hit the US outside of the ME. Why? Cause it does no serve their purposes. Hamas and IJ haven't either. The only terror org that has ever tried to attack the US in the US was Al Qaeda. The difference is that Al Qaeda has transnational aims, while the vast majority of terror orgs have purely national aims.

Didn't Hezbollah carry out a bombing in Argentina?

[Ramo]

Yes, let's kick some real terrorist ass. Like in Colombia, which has the highest mortality rate for trade unionists in the world. Oh wait, they're our ally in the "war against terror." Nevermind.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Dom Pedro II
Sikander... I recommend you to a book called The New Jackals by Simon Reeve written in 1998... that's where I got a large portion of this information, but by no means all... a lot of the rest of it came from a New York Time's book called Out of the Blue about September 11th.

I knew that you were working from a very few sources as the tone of your post reminded me of a book outline. That's why I'm asking you to break down your claims on certain things to the original source. Either the book you read is footnoted and may be the result of solid research (or may not), or it is mostly opinion which may or may not be based upon some decent knowledge of events.

You seem to have come away with a thesis more or less, but not one that makes all that much sense. Are you saying that the U.S. created the groups that we are currently fighting? If so, you are wrong. In some cases we worked with some of these groups for what was perceived to be our mutual benefit. But these groups exist for their own reasons much as we exist for our own reasons. The fact that Britain and France have from time to time worked with one another says very little about their origins or raison d'etre of either group. It is not enough to show a tenuous link between a part of the U.S. government and a particular group to vindicate your thesis that we helped create these groups. If that is the case than we have helped create almost every group of whatever sort on the planet. We have global interests and our economy makes up about 25% of the GDP of the planet. Point by point:

Saddam Hussein existed before the U.S. decided to back his war against the Iranians. We didn't like him, but he was very useful in taking a lot of the steam out of the Iranian revolution which we liked even less. We could have helped him more than we did, but we weren't interested in his regime emerging victorious from that war, only in the survival of the Iraqi state as a bulwark against Iranian fundamentalism and revolution. We were successful in this.

In Afghanistan we were mainly interested in drawing Soviet energy away from their Western border with Europe and into their southern border region. This was part of a much larger struggle that had been going on for over 30 years already, the cold war. Millions of troops were lined up to face each other in this struggle, along with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Proxy warfare, often using guerillas was often the only means of testing one another in this struggle, and Afghanistan was by no means the only theatre of its type. It did stand out as the only theatre where we could do damage to Soviet forces directly however, and we made the most of it as did our allies.

We weren't the only ones who viewed the Soviets as a major threat. When the Afghan war started the U.S. military was quite weak, having never been properly rebuilt after Vietnam. Soviet activity in Afghanistan concerned China, Pakistan, Iran as much as it concerned us, as they all shared a border with the Soviet Union as well as Afghanistan. Pakistan had been a cold war ally for years, while China had moved from our mortal enemy to a position of slightly more than a benevolent neutral in regards to the Soviet Union. Iran was our enemy, but nonetheless saw a useful opportunity to help deny Afghanistan to the godless communists as well as develop its own sphere of influence in Afghanistan.

I think that it is fair to say that the U.S. took the lead in stirring the Afghan pot that would eventually cook the Soviet goose. (metaphor-o-rama!) We found people who would oppose the Soviets. We would have preferred that these people be products of the Enlightenment, or staunch Capitalists, or even Christians. But one does not find those sort of people in sufficient numbers in Afghanistan to do much damage. What one does find in Afghanistan are plenty of local leaders, mostly Muslims who are often quite willing to thumb their noses at any central government. They bring to the table smallish groups of hardy fighters who happen to be fairly expert at guerilla warfare.

The war was a long and complex one, and a single volume history couldn't do it justice, so I'll not attempt to either. Suffice it to say that between the extraordinarily complex interplay amongst the Afghans themselves, their main foe the Soviets and the various foreigners who meddled there, the Soviets were bled white after 10 years as were the Afghans themselves. China made some good money supplying arms to the Mujahedeen and were satisfied to see the Soviets humbled, while Pakistan expanded its influence in Afghanistan enormously as did Saudi Arabia. Both of the latter countries also enjoyed the fact that they were able to bleed off some internal opposition by promoting the struggle against the godless communists to help fellow muslims. The U.S. for its part saw a very large swing in its fortunes. While the Soviet Army was being destroyed and shown for a paper tiger in Afghanistan for a very cheap price as far as the U.S. was concerned, the U.S. was rebuilding its forces both quantitatively and especially qualitatively. Within a couple of years after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan the Soviet Union itself collapsed.

The Mujahedeen were the warriors who brought the Soviets low in Afghanistan. We did not create them, nor were they terrorists. We did have a hand in starting that war, but the Mujahedeen were willing participants for their own reasons, just as the Pakistanis or the Saudis were. The longer the war dragged on the less the U.S. had to do with it. Our influence was limited in large part by the fact that the Saudis were providing huge amounts of funding as well as not inconsiderable numbers of foreign Jihadis for the cause, which was turning the conflict more and more into a religious one. Likewise the Pakistanis were determined to exert as much influence as possible over the conflict for which they were providing a base area and considerable material assistance. When the Soviets packed up and left the U.S. washed its hands of the conflict.

The war raged on after the Soviets left, with the rump Communist apparatus and the various ethnic armies the main players. None managed to come out on top permanently, as alliances crumbled whenever anyone seemed to be on the verge of final victory. As each group exhausted itself in turn, the Pakistanis formed The Taliban as described in my previous post. These fresh troops swept in like a hurricane against the exhausted remnants of the Mujahedeen and tribal militias, and took control of Afghanistan by 1996. The Taliban were not terrorists either, but a religious army. They established one of the bleakest regimes on the planet. The only good thing that they managed to do was end the civil war in a vast majority of the country, with only about 10% of the country managing to resist them by the time they were swept out of power by the U.S. and its allies in 2001-2002.

As for OBL, again the U.S. did not create him. We didn't train him or the Jihadis who fought with him. We merely shared a goal of defeating the Soviets with him, just as we shared a goal with the Soviets of defeating Nazi Germany in WW2. It was OBL himself who came up with the idea for Al Qaida, and the Saudis who used the Afghan war to diffuse internal pressure by venting it into Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Originally posted by Dom Pedro II
And no, it's not like a butterfly flapping its wings. We're not talking chaos theory here. The government most certainly had a very integral role in the creation of terrorists.

Which terrorists are you talking about here? If you mean the Contras, then I would agree for the most part. If you mean Al Qaida then I don't agree. Terrorist groups created by states for their own narrow purposes tend to be very small and very vulnerable to dissolution once the sponsorship of the state that created and fed them is withdrawn. No one fears the Red Brigades or the Baader-Meinhoff people these days for good reason. Al Qaida is not one of these groups. The Taliban aren't even a terrorist group at all. Hussein's remnants never depended upon the U.S. for their existance, though again we shared a common goal in holding off the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war. Our natural antipathy for one another had us at war with them within 3 years after the end of that war.

Originally posted by Dom Pedro II
My father worked with the CIA for years, had family members worked FOR the CIA, knew people involved with the CIA, and so he is very familiar with CIA tactics, and they DID DO these kind of things. And if you don't believe it, then you're just plain naive.

I'll match my intel credentials against yours anyday. I worked for Army intelligence during this period, and I know many people who worked for NSA, CIA, DIA, other intelligence agencies both civilian and military as well as U.S. Special Forces in SW Asia and North Africa, including Chad, Sudan, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada etc. I paid attention to what was going on at the time both because of personal curiosity as well as professional interest. My contacts gave me a number of individual perspectives on a host of operations during this time period. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know half of what happened during this time period, but the half that I do know along with my familiarity with the organizations who operated in various places, their goals and methods give me a pretty good idea of when someone is talking out their as$.

[WRangler Rhymer]

The terrorist are stupid Iraq will be a lesson that they will never forget. There are special operation groups that are just for getting terrorist, like FAST teams, and marine antiterrorist teams roaming the globe at present. FAST teams can deploy around the world in seconds. There are also many more antiterrorist squads out there just more secret then these.

[BeBMan]

Originally posted by WRangler Rhymer
FAST teams can deploy around the world in seconds.

In seconds? They should be called VERY FAST

[WRangler Rhymer]

They were deployed after the USS COLE bombing and they neutralized any further terrorist threats, they have done many other things as well.

[Kuciwalker]

From grammar and syntax, I predict WRangler is either a) ten years old, b) speaks english as a second language, or c) both. I lean towards A.

[Whaleboy]

You spew copious quantities of meaningless drivel constantly.

I get that a lot. It usually boils down this this... I speak, you do not understand. My views and my language are perfectly viable and I debate them with those who understand.. of which there are many. However, perhaps you can provide some examples to back up your ad hominem?

[Whaleboy]

Skywalker:

[Whaleboy]

Sikander: I think he is saying that specific terrorists like Bin Laden were helped directly by the Americans, as indeed they were, so we can infer that the terrorist threat today was spawned in part by the Americans.

I do not care much for such inferences, what is truly relevant is the reason that much of Islamic society hates us. As such terrorism will always be a problem, like the skin on cold soup.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by elijah
I get that a lot. It usually boils down this this... I speak, you do not understand.

From my experience in the OT, Sikander is smart enough to understand what you're saying, by far.

[Whaleboy]

Well, other people seem to understand perfectly well. Perhaps he's pissed that I disagree

[Kuciwalker]

Elijah, I understand what you say. I'd say most of us on Poly are smart enough to understand what you say. We just disagree with it. Despite what you think (this is self-evident from your attitude and your sig), you are not the most intelligent being on this planet.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by skywalker
you are not the most intelligent being on this planet.

Of course ! That's me !

[Kuciwalker]

Well, yeah, after those columns on what makes a good civ game, I'm forced to agree